The US EPA found that the emails simply reflect "a candid discussion of scientists working through issues that arise in compiling and presenting large complex data sets."
The US National Science Foundation concluded: "Finding no research misconduct..., this case is closed."
The reports also indicated that none of the widely quoted statements had the meaning put on them by those who consider global warming a conspiracy. For example, "Mike's [Michael Mann's] Nature Trick" is "nothing more than a statistical method used to bring two or more different kinds of data sets together in a legitimate fashion by a technique that has been reviewed by a broad array of peers in the field." Phil Jones' phrase "hide the decline" referred not to declining temperatures but to "a decline in the reliability of tree rings to reflect temperatures after 1960," which is known as the "divergence problem." And Kevin Trenberth's "travesty" that "we can't account for the lack of warming" referred simply to a 2009 paper by him about the planet's energy budget, in which he lamented the fact that our observation systems cannot track all the energy flow.
Nevertheless, denialists did not stop talking about "climategate." For example, the first four of these reports had been published before August of 2010, but Fox News had a program that month called "The Green Swindle," in which Glenn Beck said that the hacked emails "reveal a plot among the world's top climate scientists to hide the real inconvenient truth that the evidence supporting man-made global warming is far from conclusive" (Fool's Rule, p. 216).
In response to attacks on his scientific integrity, Mann launched a lawsuit. In 2013, a DC Superior Court found sufficient evidence that the Competitive Enterprise Institute was guilty of "actual malice" to allow Mann's lawsuit to go forward; and in 2014, the court said the same about Mann's suit against Mark Steyn and National Review for saying, with a reference to a child molester, that Mann had "molested and tortured data."
7. The Sun Is Responsible: Current climate change is likely due to the sun's activity.
However, insofar there has been any change in the sun's effect on the Earth, it has been in the direction of cooling since 1970, while the planet's atmosphere has continued to warm (Skeptical Science, Intermediate Level).
8. Water Vapor Is by Far the Dominant Greenhouse Gas: CO2 is, therefore, quite unimportant.
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